Dr. Martina Lawless:

If the Senators do not mind, I will group their questions, with one group on exports and another on foreign direct investment. On exports, we certainly have seen a major increase in cross-Border trade in goods since Brexit. I do not believe getting rid of any final checks between Northern Ireland and Great Britain would change that. I envisage that once firms have established links with one another, they will grow the associated market. We do not yet have any numbers on whether Brexit has impacted cross-Border services trade. Data on this tend to be a lot slower coming out.

There is certainly a case on the goods side that the restrictions with Great Britain have encouraged firms to look North and South for trade links. I see this continuing. The risk is more on the services side, which is not covered by the Northern Ireland protocol. This is where more disintegration could happen. We have not yet seen it happen because there is a lot of temporary recognition and continuation of market access on the services side but there are risks that diverging in standards or in recognition of qualifications or registrations could impact cross-border services trade.

There was a short-term and a long-term question on FDI. We have not really seen any hard data on a change in FDI into Northern Ireland. There were a lot of arguments that the special status of Northern Ireland would make it an attractive place for manufacturing FDI and that there would be access to both markets, but it has been a relatively short amount of time for investment. The degree of uncertainty about the protocol would limit this. It does not matter in a sense what the checks or documentation are for firms as long as there is certainty about what they are. This is the issue that would limit investment. Longer term, as Dr. McGuinness said, one of the key underpinnings of a lot of FDI investment is access to labour market skills. The FDI question and the education question are two sides of the same coin in terms of the potential for Northern Ireland and productivity growth and investment into Northern Ireland over time.